The Building Tradesman Newspaper

Friday, September 20, 2013

By The Building Tradesman

By Mark Gruenberg

PAI Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES (PAI) – The labor movement has made official what federation
officers forecast for months: It’s opening itself to non-union workers, too.

In resolutions and speeches at the AFL-CIO Convention in Los Angeles, the
federation’s delegates decided organized labor would represent – and speak for –
not just the organized workers in union locals, but the unorganized on the
streets, in workers’ centers, in immigrant rights’ groups and more.

“We must begin, here and now, today, the great work of reawakening a movement
of working people – all working people,” federation President Richard Trumka
declared in his keynote address.

“Greed and privilege and hate have always been with us,” he stated. “The
question is – what are we going to do about it? …We are a small part of the 150
million Americans who work for a living. We can’t win economic justice only for
ourselves, for union members alone. It’s just not possible right now. All
working people will rise together, or we will keep falling together.”

In concrete terms, union leaders drafting the implementing resolutions said,
that also means working continuously with community allies – in womens’ rights,
Latino, lesbian-gay-bisexual transgender groups and more – for campaigns that
represent the 99 percent, not the 1 percent..

“It’s pushing us all to look for ways to much more quickly broaden the labor
movement,” explained Communications Workers President Larry Cohen, who
co-chaired the effort. The goal, he said, is to broaden the federation so that
it represents, in size, organizational and individual membership and goals, the
CWA-led Democracy Campaign that has been going for approximately two years.

That campaign, led by CWA, the Sierra Club, the NAACP and others, marshaled a
51-group 50-million member coalition for several specific goals. The first
immediate one, which they won, was to break the Senate GOP’s filibuster tactics
that trashed the National Labor Relations Board and other Obama administration
nominees.

That coalition is still going, and has become one model for reaching the
non-unionists. But it also emphasizes permanent alliances and
coalition-building with community groups, including letting non-union workers
in, he says. “It’s not just about me and my union,” Cohen adds. “For 99
percent of the people, that’s not going to work.”

But Cohen acknowledged there is opposition to the idea of letting other
constituencies – if not other workers – into the AFL-CIO’s decision-making
process.

Talking to several reporters afterwards, he said that only those other
groups, such as Jobs With Justice, who are full-fledged dues-paying members of
state feds and central labor councils – the organizations that will do the heavy
lifting in integrating non-unionists into the movement – will get votes on
policies.

Trumka’s initiative to open the labor movement to non-union groups, if not
his parallel movement to open the fed to non-unionized workers, upset the
building trades and several other unions. They raised questions about voices
and votes in labor’s councils. The building trades in particular objected to
allowing particular groups whose goals differ or oppose creating jobs. They
singled out the environmentalists, especially those who have protested coal
plant construction and the building the Keystone Pipeline down the center of the
nation. “It’s not checkers,” Cohen admitted. “It’s going to be messy.”

Working America, the federation’s affiliate for people who can’t or won’t,
join local unions, will also be key to broadening the labor movement, its
executive director, Karen Nussbaum, told the same press conference before the
convention delegates voted.

“As our members became more active, we found them more eager to connect with
other people on issues in their communities,” she explained. “So we’re building
a new relationship for our affiliates” – union locals, state federations and
central labor councils – “to reach out to those who have been laid off or
privatized or those who are strong union supporters who vote ‘yes’” on labor’s
side “in election campaigns.”

Several such relationships are already going on the local level, notably in
the Twin Cities, with another planned in Portland, Ore. They’ll be models for
the federation’s outreach and inclusion of non-union workers, she added.

“I’m not in a union,” added Denise Watts, a St. Paul, Minn. retail food
worker. “But I’m really grateful to have a place to discuss issues” important
to workers – without managers looking over her shoulder. Working America, she
explained, provides that.

That still leaves the problem of how to integrate the outside groups into the
AFL-CIO, even as the federation recruits nonunion workers, with or without their
aid. Convention delegates who marched to microphones in an unending parade
advocating integration looked beyond that. They said it’s absolutely needed,
and never mind the details.

“We owe it to our active members to broaden this
coalition,” said Guillermo Perez, a Steel Worker from Pittsburgh. “We are
losing our density and our leverage. We as a movement bargain a social contract
and we cannot bargain it alone.”